Aside from Ukraine and President Joe Biden’s cognitive health, the other major concern of the NATO summit is the containment of China, and the roping in of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand into an ever-expanding NATO. “[W]e will also meet the Heads of Federal Government from our Asia-Pacific partners, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea and the war in Ukraine demonstrates how our security is interlinked because Iran, North Korea and China are the main enablers of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters this morning ahead of today’s summit meetings.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian rejected NATO’s extension into the Western Pacific, yesterday, and called on the alliance to abandon its Cold War mentality, during the ministry’s regular press briefing. “As a vestige of the Cold War and the world’s biggest military bloc, NATO claims itself to be a regional defensive alliance on the one hand, but on the other hand keeps reaching beyond its boundary, expanding its mandate, stoking confrontation and acting like a bully on the world stage,” he said. “NATO’s so-called security is more often than not built on others’ insecurity, and what it does puts the world and regions at high security risk.”
